764 EDWARD ATKINSON. 



hungry at the lowest price ; that Vanderbilt achieved his great fortune 

 by reducing the cost of moving a barrel of flour a thousand miles, — from 

 three dollars and fifty cents to less than seventy cents. This was the 

 great work assigned to him, whether he knew it or not. His fortune 

 was but an incident, — the main object, doubtless, to himself, but a 

 trifling incident compared to what he saved others." ^ 



He then goes on to show that whatever may be the tricks or wrongs 

 of commerce, they he on the surface, and that every great success is 

 based upon very simple facts. "The great manufacturer," he says, 

 " who guides the operations of a factory of a hundred thousand spindles, 

 in which fifteen hundred men, women, and children earn their daily 

 bread, himself works on a narrow margin of one fourth of a cent on 

 each yard of cloth. If he shall not have applied truth to every branch 

 of construction and of the operation of that factory, it will fail and 

 become worthless ; and then with toilsome labor a hundred and fifty 

 thousand women might try to clothe themselves and you, who are now 

 clothed by the service of fifteen hundred only. 



" Such is the disparity in the use of time, brought into beneficent 

 action by modern manufacturing processes. 



"The banker who deals in credit by millions upon millions must 

 possess truth of insight, truth of judgment, truth of character. Pro- 

 bity and integrity constitute his capital, for the very reason that the 

 little margin which he seeks to gain for his own service is but the 

 smallest fraction of a per cent upon each transaction. I supervise 

 directly or indirectly the insurance upon four hundred million dollars' 

 worth of factory property. The products of these factories, machine- 

 shops, and other works must be worth six hundred million dollars a 

 year. It is n't worth fifty cents on each hundred dollars to guarantee 

 their notes or obligations, while ninety-nine and one half per cent of 

 all the sales they make will be promptly paid when due." ^ 



He elsewhere turns from viewing the factory system with business 

 eyes alone to the consideration of it from the point of view of the 

 laborer. There is no want of sympathy, we soon find, in this man of 

 inventions and statistics. He thus goes on : 



" The very manner in which this great seething, toiling, crowded 

 mass of laboring men and women bear the hardships of life leads one 

 to faith in humanity and itself gives confidence in the future. If it 

 were not that there is a Divine order even in the hardships which seem 

 so severe, and that even the least religious, in the technical sense, 



*• Address to Alumni of Andover, p. 1. 

 a Ibid., p. 10. 



